Very nice! That's stackering the Win 3.11 boot disk itself? I am curious how much that compresses.. Also, would that work on a 'modern' PC - such as a Socket 7 system? (of ~ Pentium MMX era/vintage)? I have a K6-3+ BIOS modded Socket 7 system I use for fun. (OC'd to 75 MHz bus = 450 MHz). On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 8:33 PM Richard Cini <rich.cini@gmail.com> wrote:
Ha, just pulled out a copy of Stacker 4.0 and compressed a floppy disk. 2.8MB free. That's a lot of room :-)
Rich
-- Rich Cini http://www.classiccmp.org/cini http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32
On 9/5/20, 7:28 PM, "Richard Cini" <rich.cini@gmail.com> wrote:
Yeah, I thought of that too. I did this within Parallels on my Mac (so, going back and forth between Windows XP and MS-DOS 6.22 running as virtual machines) and Parallels doesn't support DMF (or anything other than 1.44MB). Neither does VirtualBox interestingly. It might be possible to do it on a real PC, but not sure.
Yes, that extra 200k would make a huge difference in what could be included. Another way, that I haven't dried, is using Doublespace to create a virtual drive on the floppy.
Rich
-- Rich Cini http://www.classiccmp.org/cini http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32
On 9/5/20, 7:23 PM, "vcf-midatlantic on behalf of John Heritage via vcf-midatlantic" <vcf-midatlantic-bounces@lists.vcfed.org on behalf of vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
How about using one of the extended disk formats - 1.68MB or whatever format IBM Used for their OS/2 floppies? or is that not bootable? (This format was at least readable by standard 1.44 MB drives using standard 1.44MB disks.. )
Interesting challenge !
On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 7:20 PM Richard Cini via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vcfed.org> wrote:
> Not really sure what applicability this really has, but today’s challenge > was to get Windows 3.11 Enhanced Mode running from a single 1.44MB floppy > disk. There are easy ways to get Standard mode running, including using > files from “precopy.cab” on Windows 95 or 98, but this was way more > challenging. I started from a full install and pared it down using a guide > I found (which was a two-disk solution). > > > > The boot files and required extras (HIMEM, PKUNZIP and a very small > ramdrive driver) took about 300K, leaving only about 1.2MB (1.156MB to be > exact) for a complete install. A normal no-frills install is about 3-ish > megabytes. > > > > There are significant compromises – no virtual memory, no networking, no > multimedia, only system fonts, and only a few apps, but once running you > could run them from another floppy. I discovered that 386Enh won’t put a > temporary swapfile on a RAM drive, so it runs without it. > > > > I guess you could call this the 1992 version of PortableApps :-) > > > > Rich > > > > -- > > Rich Cini > > http://www.classiccmp.org/cini > > http://www.classiccmp.org/altair32 > > > > > >